“I became an actor to please girls” – Philippe Lellouche

French actor, director, author and now humorist Philippe Lellouche confessed to Marie-Claude Barrette, during the most recent episode ofOpen your game, that he had only become an actor to please women.

«[Les femmes] have ruled my whole life. If I’m completely honest with you, I became an actor to please girls,” he told the host, with a smirk.

“I didn’t give a damn about Molière when I was 16. I wanted to do this because I thought I had understood, at the cinema, one day with some school friends […] that to please girls I had to have close-ups,” he confided, explaining that after the presentation of the feature film Lyrics and musicall his classmates, including the one he had his eye on, were completely under Richard Anconina’s spell.

“When the film came out, they all said: ‘Richard Anconina, he’s great. He’s handsome’ and I said to myself: ‘But no, Richard Anconina is not handsome. He’s charming, but the handsome guy is Christophe Lambert’. They said to me: ‘Yes, but there I saw him in close-up’, and there I said to myself: ‘Well I need close-ups. That’s what girls like'”, he added.

The actor, whose brother and son practice the same profession, then told Marie-Claude Barrette that pleasing girls had been his real driving force for years, but also that he had started to accumulate conquests from his early twenties, when he had known how to use his charms.

“To realize years later that it was you who were dirtying,” he confessed, emphasizing that at the time he had an urgency to please after feeling rejected as a teenager because he was not the “pretty guy.”

“I started this job wanting to be loved by everyone. I quickly realized that it was an illusion. Then you realize that you can’t be loved by everyone and then you’re happy not to be loved by everyone because you yourself hate them,” continued the actor, who will be in Montreal next fall to present his first solo show, Stand Alone.

During this episode, Philippe Lellouche also discussed the death of his father and his own relationship with fatherhood.